In order to reduce the complexity of modeling the actual link performance within system level simulations, an accurate block error rate (BLER) prediction method is required to map link performance, for communication system capacity evaluation.
A well-known approach to link performance prediction is the Effective Exponential SINR (Signal to Interference Plus Noise Ratio) Metric (EESM) method. This approach has been widely applied to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) link layers and minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) detection for receiver algorithm, but this approach is only one of many possible methods of computing an ‘effective SINR’ metric.
One of the disadvantages of the EESM approach is that a scalar normalization parameter (β) must be computed for each modulation and coding scheme (MCS) for many scenarios. In particular, for broader link-system mapping applications, it may be inconvenient to use EESM for adaptive modulation with Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ), because adaptive HARQ requires the codewords in different modulation types be combined in the different transmission/retransmissions. In addition, it may be difficult to extend this method to maximum likelihood detection (MLD) in single-input and single-output (SISO) or Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) cases, because EESM uses the post-processing SINR.
An embodiment of this invention overcomes the shortcomings of EESM by employing a mutual information method for the PHY abstraction/link performance prediction on MLD receivers.